I read a study once that found siblings, in terms of personality, aren’t demonstrably more similar than two people you might pull off the street. Researchers speculated on a variety of causes, but whatever the reason, in our house, this could not be more true. Julia is a night owl. Even when she was a […]

I’m waiting patiently for something to come into my head. In this tradition, the training is to keep up a pretty strong practice, study the suttas and sit with your teachers so that when you are asked to be in this spot, there’s something to reflect on. What’s been coming up for me in the […]

This practice has changed my life in countless ways, but some things seem to stay infuriatingly, excruciatingly the same. For instance, nearly every month I wag my aging finger and say, We’ll really be somewhere, meditation practice, when you fix my PMS. In the midst of familiar decades-old behaviors — snippiness, binge snacking, happycrying during […]

I have a pretty small house and two little kids who seem to take up more space than the big kids that I know. So we’re often kind of bumbling around in there, literally bumping into each other and walls and furniture. Lately, my son who is seven, has been learning how to do a […]

Julia, age 4: Ethan, I see you changed a little. Ethan, 7: Yes I stopped lying. Julia: I meant CHANGED CLOTHES. I learn a lot from listening to my kids talk to each other. I feel lucky to be a fly on the wall to many of their conversations — they teach me so much […]

My kids — most kids — are always ready for a few rounds. These days E in particular begins bargaining and buttering up long before he even makes a request. “Mom,” he’ll start, “you don’t have to say yes, and I know you might say no, but would it be OK if we…?” He might […]

Recently, I got into a heated argument about love. We had just been to the Pacific Hermitage Pah Bah, which is an annual almsgiving ceremony for monastics in the Theravada Thai Forest Tradition. The venerable Luang Por Viradhammo, a wry East Coast Canadian monk of more than 30 years, gave the Dhamma talk. He spoke […]

There are good days, and there are days like yesterday, when by dinner, I’m certain one more minute will be one too many to bear the shove and pull of family life. E and I were in the basement sharing in his laundry task. I told him, I’m having a hard time today. You are yelling […]

an older essay, from July 2014 The other day I said to E: “Turn off the TV before I get angry.” He responded, and not at all snarkily, “You’re already angry.” He was right, and if he would have said that once a day for the preceding innumerable days, he would have been right all […]

“This was not the oatmeal I prefer, but I ate it anyway.” I was floored when those words came out of my 7-year-old son’s mouth this morning. E has never been a paragon of emotional maturity, and although he sees the truth in many things, he rarely seems to act in his own best interest […]